Waking up to the sound of a current, Yuri batted away yellow light, but aside from that she was surrounded by black fog.

She shut her eyes, but her consciousness awoke.

…Did I fall in the jewellers? She thought, Oh, no, I ruined the date!

Yuri sat upright, and rough wood ate into her palms. She was on a bridge over a river, and found that the yellow that had awoken her was not the indoor bulbs of the jewellers but the splitting horizon of a setting sun. Yuri grabbed her chest over her heart. She clenched hard as she anticipated her breath to start spasming.

This can’t be real. Then as her breathing steadied, the fog around her did too, and she thought back to where she was previously.

Ipyo, did he actually do it? Did he propose, then and there? Yuri wondered, chuckling as she rose to her feet, And I rewarded him with a panic attack?

Standing on the rickety bridge was strangely easy. Her body kept its balance, even as she squirmed at the sight of running water between the planks under her feet. Her movements were in a detached state where it wasn’t weight that restricted her speed, but a fuzziness of the mind. As if she had a stroke and her brain was not connected -not wired as tightly as before.

Neither did Yuri wear anything resembling the kind of skirt-cardigan combo she’d normally wear, but instead a breezy cotton shirt tucked into brown leather pants -that yet had no tightness to them, did not make her thighs chafe as she stepped. She instinctively went to smooth the pants down. Why…do I have a thigh gap? Whose body is this? Containing her shock, Yuri began to walk down the narrow bridge in search of answers.

From seemingly nowhere, a woman’s voice flowed through her ears.

“Welcome to the Wrought Valley,” it said. “You will control Deities, powerful manifestations of the people’s beliefs, and do battle against the Deity’s of others.”

As soon as the sky lady finished, the bridge shook with the rhythm of a march, like just beyond the wall of black fog was an army.

“Pick up,” the lady told her, “In front of you, the Vagabond Cannons”.

Bending to pick them, Yuri noticed no tension or pain in her back. Righting herself as easily as tumbling in the sea, she admired the weapons. These were no modern implement; a gun definitely, some weird amalgamation a madman in the 1800s must’ve thought of. Each of the hand-cannons had three barrels of glistening charcoal, and a thick wooden grip like a butcher’s knife.

Though it was such a foreign object to look at, it felt amazing in her grasp, it felt far more real than the steps Yuri had taken. As real as the formation of soldiers draped in front of her, clad in orange, curved blades and small shields -reminiscent of the Mongolian raiders in history books.

The guns, the Vagabond Cannons battled for control of her mind, their energy and lustful freedom as alive as the fear that seethed inside her. Yuri locked up.

This is not heaven, is it? She thought, and looked back.

But steps behind her, where she came from, the black fog had claimed back the bridge so that she could only go forward. The cannons pulled up like soft magnets towards the attackers.

Are they even loaded? Yuri thought. What if I miss?

She shook her head and closed her eyes as the cannons continued to pull against her limp arms like a child in a shopping mall, daring her to fire.

The announcer spoke again, without a hint of tension. “Select an attacker with your mouse to start attacking them.”

Yuri spread her stance. “My mouse? Like, a computer mouse? But I don’t—"

She curled the cannons in her hand and felt them shake.

The raiders brandished their swords, headscarves swaying behind them. But strangely, there was no great anger emanating from them. It wasn’t like walking down a dark alley of Hui’an, wary of gangs. They were just…there. So Yuri slid to a side stance, pointed a cannon forward and slammed the trigger.

She had braced herself for an explosion of sound, a force to rip her arm backwards into her shoulder -and there was an impact, but not at all what she expected. The raider did not scream or fall off the bridge into the marshy stream below. Instead, a red bar popped into existence over their head, like a car’s brake light. Then cracked, red ends of the bar flying off, shortening it.

Still, the raiders continued.

Yuri backpedalled. This can’t be real! She scraped her heel off the end of the bridge and cursed. But she held on, astounded at her own balance.

If this was real, I would be face down in the riverbed already.

“What do I do?” She screamed up into the ginger clouds.

The announcer came again as a response. In the same way, with the same words.

“Select an enemy with your mouse to start attacking it.”

“I don’t have a fucking mouse!” Yuri yelled, directing her anger at the front raider again with her left cannon. She shot, and another chunk of the sideways, red bar exploded into the air like a dropped vial.

Raiders seconds from colliding with her, Yuri held down her ground, tapping her heels down into the wood of the bridge, and the cannon’s energy lent itself to her. Gripping hard, she felt power surge through her hands. Then, like a rapid backstroke, she continued to fire the cannons. More bars showed up and were mashed back, and she was at once controlling herself and completely in disbelief, feeling that she was watching a superhuman vision of herself cleave bullet after bullet into these raiders.

How much ammunition is there inside these things?

Some of them fell away with their life bars, but not all. A final raider remained, undeterred, and swung into Yuri’s shoulder, making her scream.

This is the pain from a blade? Yuri blasted a final shot into the raiders chin. There was pain, but not anything on the level of a wedge of honed metal slicing into her bone. More like…a punch from someone with particularly bony knuckles.

As the last raider drooped, falling off the side of the bridge with a sludgy splash, the announcer returned.

“Well done,” it said, like Yuri was a waiter who had brought her a complimentary glass of water.

“Now defeat the next wave.”

Vibrations came again from afar. Pressuring her shoulder with the palm of one of her hands, Yuri winced and cursed at the sky.

“Oh, fuck you, lady! This isn’t heaven, is it?”

As she checked the furrowed clouds above for a comeback, she noticed something at the rim of her vision; another bar. Green this time, and as she circled around looking for its source, it remained stapled in front of everything else. Okay, interesting.

She nodded and moved forward, energy springing back from her hands into her legs, making her strut as she headed toward the enemies just outside her field of vision. She took another glance at the green bar -not that she was able to look away from it- and smiled. I get it, the green bar is my life. Even after that strike earlier, the bar had barely receded. It would take a lot more than four slow-moving raiders to destroy her.

As new raiders entered through the black sheet of fog, the unfeeling announcer returned.

“When controlling a chosen Deity, you gain access to special abilities.”

Oh really?

“Press the button now to activate your first ability,” the announcer told her.

Not this again. Yuri raised her cannons up together and began to fire. Or, she tried to, but nothing came out, even as she repeatedly hammered on the triggers.

Oh, god! I’m out of ammo!

She trembled as the new wave of four stomped down the bridge, searching the barrels of the guns. But there was nothing inside them, no way to insert or store ammunition.

Then where did all the ammunition come from?

With a screeching groan, she lowered the weapons and looked to the sky lady for guidance as a bolt struck her chest. Yuri keeled forward and gagged, feeling around fruitlessly for the lodged weapon. But the pain -the pain- even the pain went from a sudden stabbing to little more than the prick of being forced to lie flat against jagged, wet cobblestones.

Again, she stumbled and almost tripped down into the marshy, corpse-filled waters sleeping under the bridge. Easily regaining her balance -That’s so unlike me- she focused her gaze but could not see any of the raiders from before, neither floating nor sunken in between the reeds.

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None if this is real, it can’t be. Am I …in a coma, stuck inside my brain?

This raider group approached as slowly as the last, and never stopped or slowed; They were a confident inevitability, brandishing their blades up into the sunset. Sulking behind them were a couple of hooded men, crossbows raised. The front one in the middle of reloading, the other with his fingers poised at the trigger. Another step and he fired.

Ducking as quick as she could with the fuzzy control of her body, the bolt still found her head. Knocked to her knees, she panted, and the familiar tensing of her lungs dragged her face down further to kiss the bridge.

How can this be just a dream, she thought, If I’m having an asthma attack

Standing, she again shouted into the sky, “Can’t you conjure up an inhaler, sky lady?” Then immediately wheezed.

But even when the pains inside her comatose dreams faded as soon as they hit, the suffocation of her asthma attacks were as lasting, and as awful as ever.

“Use your abilities to clear the enemies faster,” the announcer said.

Faster? She looked around again, wishing this indifferent angel above would show her face; she’d clear her. Instead she caught the sight of her life bar with a couple more bites taken out of it. Less than half of it remained. Yuri swung a cannon up, flicked it into the face of the closest raider. Get out of my face, life bar. I’ll survive this no matter how small you are!

As she flicked it, the triple barrels on the hand-cannon rotated, clicking a different section into place, and the gun felt at least a pound heavier.

Yuri could only shrug and hope that’d work, pulling the trigger. The shot rang out louder, the kickback more brutal than before, and hit not just the target she aimed for but also ricocheted back into the crossbowman that had struck her.

“Yes!” Yuri drew up the other gun and shot in glee, delighted that it worked, not wondering why, just aiming and firing more.

The raiders were two down by the time they had reached her. By that point Yuri was concentrated only on the satisfaction of chunking out their life bars -like seeing a gin bottle empty over the course of a good night. It became so addicting that she barely responded when she was slashed into and pin cushioned. She wasn’t even paying attention to her life bar shrinking.

The only thing that frustrated her was the fact that she could not get her cannons to revolve again after the first time and create the ricocheting shot. And yet, her bullets did not seem to run out even though she had definitely fired more than in her last encounter.

So why did it stop firing earlier?

With the last raider disposed of, Yuri tried to grab back her breath. I could never have managed that in real life, but even for this body, that was a bit much.

She expected the announcer to summon another round of attackers for her to contend with, so Yuri was conserving herself; calming herself. The tips of her lungs still forcing her to tug out each breath.

Out of the relative quiet shone an arrow. Translucent blue, shining like a sheet of solid crystal. Continuing to calm the shadow of a panic attack, Yuri followed it, feeling her senses slowly recede. As she stumbled down the bridge, her vision seemed to sharpen in bursts, like blinking away layers of black dust, the bridge spreading out into wide planks. At the furthest end of the wider platform stood a stubby tower tall, a flame shimmering through slits in its many ridged sides. Heading towards it, Yuri first stepped around the arrows that appeared, but she quickly noticed that they, like her life bar, were an overlaid illusion, and instead stepped through them, letting them dissolve in a sparkling diamond mist around her boots.

Gripping her hand-cannons harder, they were fast becoming a part of her in this new existence. But past events were still bumbling their way around her, occasionally making themselves known as a memory.

Ipyo…he was about to take out a loan just to buy me a ring, wasn’t he?

Without the rage of battle, Yuri shivered as she walked along the river.

If he actually did it, if he proposed, she thought as she entered the wider square platform, Would I have said yes?

The wood beneath her creaked in response to each clack of her heels. The small sound soon filling up the area, nothing to take its place. Not the waters, nor any activity beneath. Not even Yuri’s breathing.

What does it matter now, if I’m trapped in this comatose nightmare?

She flicked both cannons with her arms held high, and the barrels of each shifted together with a deeper clink. Their weight heavier than the last time she shifted them.

Yuri shouted into the sky, guns aiming at the curled, bobbing clouds.

“Announcer lady, are you me? Is this what I think of myself; a brutal bitch; a just-about survivor on a narrow, inevitable path?”

Her own voice did not echo like the sounds of cracking wood or the shots of her guns, it sapped away in front of her. Yuri felt like she hadn’t said anything.

But she got an answer all the same. Hurtling past the tower in the distance was a roaring figure, creating not vibrations, but tremors in the bridge. Yuri shot her cannons into the air with surprise and tried to circle out of its way.

As the figure approached, Yuri saw that this enemy was a juggernaut of a man, charging with a lumber axe raised over his head. Unlike the emotionless approach of the raiders before, he had actual menace to his attack.

Yuri whipped her gun up, but her trigger only sighed out a click. Again?

She tried the other cannon with the same result. An empty chick chick. Checking her life bar for the first time since the last fight, Yuri thought about what would happen if she let it completely fall away. Death? Or something worse?

Would I wake up? thought Yuri, continuing to strafe, the attacker shifting with her. The moment that Yuri stared into the blade of the attacker’s axe, imagining being cut through, a hail of shrapnel rained down. Halting his charge, the juggernaut swung blindly through it, his life bar popping up and taking a minor hit.

The crunch of crashing bullets -Was that from the shot into the sky? - snapped Yuri out of her morbid dream. She flicked her cannons again into action, blasting the attacker with the heavy bullets of her first barrel rotation.

His life bar was sliced down with each hit but the attacker continued, raising the axe again, the glint of their blade sweeping up, like the motions of the arrows that led Yuri here. She kept shooting, but with each flick of the barrel, she felt her arms grow weary, felt the motion take its toll on her body.

Then he stopped, two feet from the range of his swing.

“I don’t want to die!” Yuri screamed, looking for the humanity in the axeman’s face.

His eyes, cheeks… all of it was as black as the fog that surrounded the arena, and he chopped, right down into the wood below. The wood cracked in a wave of energy, catapulting Yuri via the planks below here.

The murky waters came into view again while she was in the air, and Yuri was certain he’d finish the job, and that’s where she’d end up. Expecting the embrace of the cold wood, Yuri instead found that her body once again refused to let her fall.

Unbelievably, her knock-up turned into little more than a hop, and with the attacker pulling back for a direct swing Yuri just pointed, and shot. The cannon felt like a toy. But the body toppling to its knees and back through the chomp he made in the bridge, that looked real. Yuri gasped, surprised by her reaction. She could hear hollow thumps as the burly axeman hit off the undersides of the bridge, the current carrying him away, not behind Yuri, but back from where he came, past the tower.

Another arrow appeared without ceremony, leading Yuri to the tower. Once she got close enough to make out some kinds of wooden structure inside, the clouds above rumbled and the announcer finally returned.

“To achieve victory over the enemy team,” she said, the fog ahead parting to reveal fortifications in the distance, “You must destroy the enemy’s Soul Core.”

“Team?” Yuri asked, proceeding towards the tower.

Four beings flew down in a beam beside her, similarly lifeless to the juggernaut that had attacked her, but with a creamy filling rather than darkness blanking their eyes.

“Work with your team,” the announcer continued, “To destroy towers, fighting towards their base.”

Before Yuri could object, one of her new ‘teammates’, a woman with a shining staff pointed it forward, directing attention to a new wave of raiders, bigger than before and behind them, the same axeman that Yuri had just sent to a watery grave.

“Now that’s just stupid. This is feeling like a video game,” she said with another step, and a missile fired from the tower towards her, greying out her vision.

***

Panting, Yuri’s vision returned. On her hands and knees, she found she found she was on a narrow stretch of bridge. Cannons still in her grasp.

Back to the beginning?

She bounced up and cracked her shoulders. The surge, the tingle of power from simply holding the guns pumped through her thighs. She jogged forward.

Don’t tell me I have to do all that again.

She continued without interruption, following the same route towards the open plank square. She squinted ahead, but the tower was no longer there. Yuri kept a pace she would have killed for before being dropped in this body, without a hint of her lungs tightening or a catch in her breath. The rush of happiness pulled her onward.

Does this mean that this dream is almost over?

She stretched and moved her arms, trying to enjoy it while it lasted, even if the sensations of it were dulled.

If I wake, will Ipyo be there, waiting for me?

Dropping off the plank bridge onto a dirt path, the walls of the enemy’s base drew around her, as well as the screams and thuds of battle. The encampment was on top of a hill, and once Yuri got to its summit, she found the beings the announcer had sent to help her her scattered. And only a giant version of the axeman remained, a bloody crown clamped onto his head.

Wasting no time, Yuri held up the cannon in her left hand and continuously hammered on the trigger, while walking towards the beast that she had to defeat in order to end this.

Click chik chick chick

Chick chick chick

Chick chick

Boom!

Yuri’s hair danced in front of her face as the gun finally erupted. The crowned axeman gripped his weapon in two hands as it hit. His red life bar appeared, but Yuri couldn’t tell if her shot had made a dent in it.

Yuri frowned. “Looks like I have to use all the tricks I’ve learned,” she said, flicking the barrel of her right cannon, “But at least know I get why the gun stops working sometimes; I have to be close to the enemies I fire on.”

She blasted the second barrel’s heavy bullet at the axeman; the life bar shook. Yuri watched the axeman’s approach and for every step he took, she stepped back twice the distance, tingling in her legs keeping her limber against the lumberjack. Switching to the third barrel, she also shot him with shrapnel, which stumbled his advance like before.

Alternating her shots in succession with her special skills made her guns unbearably heavy, even with her empowered body in this dream. Still, Yuri forced herself to fire off another Another.

Another.

But still the axeman lunged, life bar at half.

Yuri looked back, down the hill and down the bridge path. The fallen allies had disappeared, just like everything else that died. If they were also brought back to the beginning, they were too far away for her to see, black fog creeping in from behind. Yuri backpedalled again, but the giant was gaining quickly. Spinning wild slashes as he stomped, the axeman whipped blades of air at Yuri, forcing her to dodge. A quick glance at her life bar showed a large chunk missing.

He’s doing damage with that weapon before he’s even touched me, Yuri thought. What can I do?

While holding her cannons up, she felt a connection between them; like an invisible bubble was pressed between the two. Ignoring the resistance, Yuri clapped through, smashing the guns into each other.

The barrels wheeled madly.

The force of the rotation made it impossible to aim, so Yuri stopped moving and focused, drawing the tingling up through her legs up into her cannons. She took a long breath and shot the axeman right at the height of his chop.

Settling into a row, all six barrels tore through the axeman in waves of explosive shots, like a fleet of pirate ships. Yuri only had to press once, then her entire job was to restrain the cannons from leaping from her grip. The assault continued for seconds even after the axeman went limp, and his crown rolled to a stop. But once it stopped, Yuri flopped, barely able to hold her weapons from off the ground.

Okay she thought, teetering toward the crown, I’m ready to go back to the real world now.

She went to crush the crown underfoot when a hole opened up. Leg first, it sucked her straight through and the last thing she saw before being consumed by the black tunnel were the pinkish clouds, drifting so slow they were practically motionless in comparison to Yuri’s fall.

If he’s there, I have to let him down gently